Cashman says Yankees were a mirage, but what about Red Sox?

Wednesday

Feb 26, 2014 at 5:50 PM

Invoking a long-held but little-discussed sabermetric tenet, New York Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said this week that his team has more ground to make up in the American League East than the standings indicate.

Brian MacPherson Journal Sports Writer brianmacp

Invoking a long-held but little-discussed sabermetric tenet, New York Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said this week that his team has more ground to make up in the American League East than the standings indicate.

That the Yankees won 85 games seemed like a minor miracle given the players who actually took the field in pinstripes a year ago. The numbers bear that out.

“I’d say Joe (Girardi), our coaches, our players worked their tail off and fought every step of the way, and they earned that record,” Cashman said, as reported in the New York Post. “But if we repeated last year’s season 100 times, that (85-77 record) would’ve been the low end of probability.”

The run differential, Cashman added, is “more reflective of the talent on the field. When you overperform, like the Orioles did (in 2012), you realize that’s more of an anomaly. And last year was a market correction.”

By the measure of the Bill James-created “Pythagorean” formula for run expectancy — estimating expected wins and losses by runs scored and runs allowed — the Yankees actually should have won closer to 79 games. They overperformed. It was an anomaly.

Part of the reason Cashman spent so lavishly this offseason — signing Carlos Beltran, Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann and Masahiro Tanaka — was to avoid the market correction.

The way Cashman — and many others — prioritize run expectancy, it’s as though they based their offseason decisions more on expected wins than actual wins. The Yankees weren’t trying to improve an 85-win team, in other words. They were trying to improve a 79-win team — meaning they had to make up six more games than one otherwise would think.

But the Yankees aren’t the only team who have to adjust their baseline expectations for this year based on luck. Every team does.

And the bad news for the American League East is that the Red Sox have to adjust their baseline expectations the other way.

What does this mean? Based on the number of runs they scored and number of runs they allowed, Boston actually underperformed by three wins, according to what could be called “cluster luck.” Tampa Bay, conversely, overperformed by five wins. The Rays didn’t have to make up five wins to catch the Red Sox. They had to make up a whopping 13.

And the Yankees? The Yankees had to make up 21 wins. Even with Ellsbury defecting from Boston and joining the Yankees — a swing of 12 wins by itself — the Yankees had nine more wins to make up to catch Boston. That they lost Robinson Cano, a six-win player, set them back even further, even with their other additions.